Today i took my first steps into the world of Linux by creating a bookable Mint Cinamon USB stick to fuck around on without wiping or portioning my laptop drive.
I realised windows has the biggest vulnerability for the average user.
While booting off of the usb I could access all the data on my laptop without having to input a password.
After some research it appears drives need to be encrypted to prevent this, so how is this not the default case in Windows?
I’m sure there are people aware but for the laymen this is such a massive vulnerability.
Previous versions of Windows only permitted drive encryption in their premium tiers, and it seems like the current one possibly requires a TPM chip for it, so a lot of hardware won’t even support it. So basically greed or greed.
For what it’s worth it’s not always a default with Linux installations either. There’s a usually minor performance hit, though I can’t say it ever bothered me. Personally I have less fear of bad actors obtaining physical access than I do myself breaking something catastrophically and losing my access, so I don’t use it now.
Are you saying the performance hit is from running off an encrypted drive?
There will be some additional time and resources required to read and write encrypted data, even if minor.
Given that AES instructions have been implemented directly in the CPU since 2008, any performance penalty should be negligible.
Thank you for the info! I like your username.